An IT Professional with over 20 years’ experience with broad consultative, technical and managerial experience. Currently a solution architect working with customers and partners to architect and deliver hybrid cloud solutions using the VMware and other leading IT technologies. Leading and supporting business transformation programs, digital enterprise enablement programmes covering organisations in both private and public sectors.
A former leader of the Bristol and South West VMUG (VMware User Group)
Simon holds multiple high level industry certifications for IT Architecture, Cloud Management and Automation. He is also a proud member of the vExpert community, holding the vExpert accolade from 2014-present, as well as being selected for the vExpert Cloud Management sub-programs.
Simon is currently working for Xtravirt as a Solution Architect and can usually be found on twitter @simoneady
I managed to dodge the rainstorms in the morning before arriving, the hotel being just across the road from the Venue was a huge help (Thank you Xtravirt)
The main session was great particularly HCX announcement and the VR admin demo.
I then hit the solutions exchange as soon as it opened. There are all the usual suspects there -except- Cisco (anyone know why?)
It was also great to see the guys from Blue Medora.
Sunday Arriving in early on Sunday as the local flight choices are more limited from Bristol than perhaps a larger Airport, very fortunate to have a hotel so close to the VMworld venue, perhaps not so great for the evening activities but I am happy with it this way around.
Other than registration (4pm-8pm) and hopefully catching up with a few folk who have also arrived early.
In the evening I had the pleasure to meet many awesome people from the vCommunity.
In this coming episode, Sunny will DIVE DEEP into the interesting topic of introducing automation into operations.
While we all know that, automating day to day operations tasks is becoming the choice of an IT organization, it is hard for them to find a solution which can completely understand their business policies and provide them the efficiency they need from automating simple operational tasks.
Based on our research, we found that, one of the most time consuming activity done by an Virtual Infrastructure Administrator is to juggle resources between the changing business requirements and ensure that every VM which is being hosted in their environment is BEING SERVED WELL.
Having missed last years VMworld I feel very ready for attending the EMEA VMworld in Barcelona.
I almost felt annoyed about missing last year as the big announcements really caused a stir in the community and wider afield. (VMware on AWS) The announcements from the US VMworld this year were equally exciting so I am very keen to hear what else VMware has planned to reveal in a Barcelona.
I have put a good deal of effort into planning what I will be doing and attending to maximise my time there without burnout (Veterans I hear you laughing)
[vRealize Operations Manager 6.6, which was recently released by VMware.
We started with an overview of all the cool new stuff and then drill down into individual areas. We then jumped into a Live Demo as usual to see the new features in action.
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Welcome to the next episode of vRealize Operations Manager Webinar Series. This time around we will talk about the latest release of vROps released in the month of June.
With this release, VMware has made drastic changes to the product and the initial reviews of the product have been great. Since I was a part of the team delivering this new release, I thought it would be a good topic to discuss in the next episode of the Webinar Series.
[<img class=“alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-8035” src="/images/2017/03/logo.jpg" alt="" width=“150” height=“150” which vROps can provide by using various extensibility solutions.
We discussed the following use cases and demonstrated them in live environments:
Use Case 1 - Full-Stack vSphere Monitoring. From application to Infrastructure.
Use Case 2 - Amazon RDS Workloads. Monitoring public cloud workloads with vROps.
Use Case 3 - vROps Extensibility. Metrics, Logs and Costing come together along with other 3rd party extensibility options.
So very recently i had a great question from a customer regarding ways to monitor things like the temperature of host systems. Would they need a management pack or is this something vROps can do out of the box?
The short answer to this is yes, but it is not immediately obvious how.
There are a great many metrics that come with a vanilla build of vROps but not all of them are enabled a good example of these are the sensor metrics.
As promised, vROps Webinar Series 2017 is back with the second episode of the year. Last time around we looked closely into the features of vROps 6.5 and as stated during that webinar, we will now show you how you can unlock the full capabilities of vROps using the extensibility of the platform.
If you have been following the Webinar Series, by now you have a complete visibility into the capabilities of vROps, when it comes to monitoring the vSphere infrastructure.
If you spend a good amount of time in vROps either at your place of work or with customers (like me) you will likely have had to create some custom XML (metric configuration) for custom dashboards.
In the past you would either use the sample/examples to get them started and then go and find the specific metric names while, this was usually quite time consuming.
In recent versions of vROps however, VMware have introduced a “builder” to help you properly format and slect the corect adapters/adapterkinds and metrics.
[<img class=“alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-8035” src="/images/2017/03/logo.jpg" alt="" width=“150” height=“150” which vROps can provide by using various extensibility solutions.
We discussed the following use cases and demonstrated them in live environments:
Use Case 1 - Full-Stack vSphere Monitoring. From application to Infrastructure.
Use Case 2 - Amazon RDS Workloads. Monitoring public cloud workloads with vROps.
Use Case 3 - vROps Extensibility. Metrics, Logs and Costing come together along with other 3rd party extensibility options.